Today, released criminal offenders on community supervision, either probation or parole, are monitored by a criminal justice supervising agency, such as a department of corrections or local law enforcement. The monitoring is based on a sentence, and often includes exclusion areas and inclusion areas with a schedule for the day of the week and a range of times associated with those areas when the released criminal offender is required to be or required not to be in those areas. A released criminal offender's geospatial location at a given date and time is monitored and recorded by tracking devices worn by the released criminal offender. This geospatial information, including date and time information, can be used to determine a released criminal offender's compliance with their sentence. Activities of released criminal offenders can be reported to the criminal justice supervising agency or to a probation or parole officer by fax, page, text message or email generated by a monitoring center unique to the criminal justice supervising agency.
Currently, an offender's geospatial location and associated date and time information can be determined by a number of different methods. These methods range from: (1) voice verification whereby an offender calls in by land line to verify his current geospatial location at a given date and time by using caller ID for a wired line phone, (2) radio frequency monitoring whereby the supervised released criminal offender wears a tamper resistant tag that communicates with receivers at a known geospatial location or geospatial locations using short range (i.e. in the range of 100 meters) radio frequency communications, to (3) tamper resistant tracking devices that record or report geospatial location points along with date and time information either in a batch mode or real time mode using a geospatial location, date and time means such as GPS, cellular triangulation, IP (Internet Protocol) address and/or a wired telephone land line caller ID for batch mode, or wireless communications for bath real time and batch modes.
Just as multiple systems are used to determine a released criminal offender's geospatial location at a given date and time, multiple databases exist containing released criminal offender geospatial location information along with date and time information. These databases are owned or operated by contracted companies providing released criminal offender monitoring products and services. Or the criminal justice supervising agency may deploy and operate released offender monitoring and reporting devices produced by vendors. These databases are disparate in terms of their physical location, operation and reporting mechanisms. These databases are heterogeneous in terms of data format since there is no formatting standard for the data collected or stored for supervised released criminal offenders, and there are multiple vendors providing products and services to monitor or locate supervised released criminal offenders. Within a single jurisdiction as small as a city or county, there may be one or more of each type of system described above, each with their own separate unique databases and unique reporting implementations. Disparate systems also do not share geospatial location information along with date and time information with each other. A system which reports supervised released criminal offender's geospatial location, date, and time information and movement history to only one of multiple agencies that may benefit from or need such information is known in the art as a stovepipe system.
Further, released offenders can cause potential threats to community safety due to high recidivism rates among particular types of offenders, Released offenders may currently be required to register their current address with a criminal justice or law enforcement agency. While the addresses for certain released offenders are frequently available online, the addresses are not always up to date, and even if they are, only provide information to a community member about the released offender's current residence, but not their current location, tendencies to loiter in other locations, or proximity to a potential or past victim. There exists a need for an improved method of monitoring released criminal offenders.